Simone, stunned, does the only thing she knows how to do: speak the stark and painful truth. ‘Women love their children more than men do,’ she tells him. ‘Everyone knows this.’ And, as she utters this sentiment, something she has felt for years but never spoken aloud, the world seems to change slightly.
‘How can you say that to me?’ he says.
‘I reorganized my whole life around her,’ she says plainly. And she did. She grew her. She fed her with fluids from her own body. She cried when she did, she got up in the night, she left work early, missed opportunities, nights out, the lot. For the first few years, Damien alone ran the restaurant and Simone had Lucy. He would arrive home after lunch service and leave again before dinner, miss Lucy’s bedtime every night. He doesn’t know how many thousand moments he missed. Stories and fights over tooth brushing and cups of warm milk and sizing up a sleep sack. He missed it. After Lucy was asleep, Simone would sit alone sometimes and think about this, feeling an odd mix of superiority and martyrdom.
‘You’d better get her back,’ he says, and this time itisspiteful. ‘I’m getting the connecting flight now. I’ll be in Texas soon. And don’t worry. I won’t call the police.Iwould not betrayyou.’
He cuts the call without saying anything further. Simone is reverberating with hurt and rage and the kind of cleansed but purged feeling that comes with having spoken an ugly truth. Damien is unspeakably disappointed with her. And Simone knows, somewhere deep inside her, that everything that happens from this moment will now be on her shoulders. If they had told the police, it would have been on Damien’s. But they’ve gone with her. A single decision. A single moment. A single truth spoken. And everything that stems from it.
CHAPTER 12
Simone drives and drives, knowing she has to cross the border but with no idea how.
She takes each problem course by course, like elements of a large tasting-menu meal she has to cook and assemble on schedule. She has the benefit of stress hormones and maternal instinct, which fire her like a rocket up the highway, make her brain five hundred per cent productive. She also has the advantage of the chef mind, wired to multitask under pressure. Her hands are at ten and two on the wheel, body still, mind racing. She thinks it through as the road spins out in front of her, as plain and straight as an airport runway. Weird trees line the road, no other cars. She could be on another planet.
Visas. She and Damien went to Florida once and then on to Cancún, and she only needed a passport. So that’s that. She doesn’t need one.
Next: concealing the items.
She needs to be inconspicuous. And maybe she is; no doubt this is why she has been chosen. Have they been targeted, as a result of their restaurant money, perhaps? Or is it bad luck? She, a British tourist, in an ordinary rental car, no criminal history. Nevertheless, she needs to ensure she won’t be searched. She needs to blend in.
She does one mile, ten, twenty. By thirty, she’s panicking,but a new text appears. A new location. One where tourist buses leave for Mexico.
Simone gets out of her car in a dusty car park. It’s fifteen minutes from the border. Tourist buses are anonymous, hiding in plain sight, holidaymakers less likely to be searched. But even if they are, nobody would be able to trace a bag back to her.
There is only one company, called Mexican Day Tours. The coach stops at Nueva Rosita at eight o’clock in the morning: a six-hour journey, taken overnight, leaving the day to explore the Mexican town. It sounds like hell to Simone, even without the burning fear, though Lucy would like it. She would find enjoyment in the different scenery, different people, and would easily be able to sleep on a coach. Tourists go on from Nueva Rosita to Múzquiz, to see the architecture, the gardens and the town squares. Some visit a stargazing point – there are camping pods – to sleep out and see the Milky Way.
But Simone won’t.
It’s late, way after eleven o’clock, and the air is cooling, though different to England, the breeze sharp but brief, as crisp as sparkling apple juice that bursts through the mouth then leaves immediately. Simone closes her car door and feels a longing for Lucy so strong it almost knocks her off her feet. She must be so scared being held by these people who don’t want the best for her.
She sighs as she crosses to the coaches. A man tells her they’re all fully booked and Simone feels a flare of irritation that the kidnappers have directed her but left her to sort out the details. Nevertheless, Simone’s able to do something she often does very well, has done her whole life from her first job to becoming an accidental chef: blag.
They opened the restaurant with virtually no experience, and, to nobody’s surprise, it made a loss for twenty straight months, burning through the HSBC loan and then some. In debt and badly reviewed, Simone hired a new chef called Timeo – his mother was French – who started making more simplistic dishes done well; he’d trained with Glynn Purnell.
Intrigued, Simone had started to spend more time in the kitchen and less front of house. She’d just shape vegetables in the beginning, enjoying the meditative quality of it, forgetting the mounting bills. Then she started to cook alongside Timeo. At first, just good meat cooked well, enough seasoning but not too much. She started reading about food, about taste buds, about salt, sour, bitter, sweet, umami. Simone became, much to her surprise, obsessed with cooking, but it was something deeper, too. Something that had begun its life when she’d started making every meal after she was removed from her parents. A way to take care of herself. Simple things, like beans on toast, but she made them on the hob, not in the microwave, to cook them into delicious sludge. Baked potatoes, made crispy in an oven.
But it had bloomed at the restaurant: when bad news came – increased prices, snobby customers – she started to cook to calm herself down. Flares of irritation became flame-grilled steaks and burnished crème brûlées. Good days became butter-soft mashed potato.
The food with Timeo in time grew more complex: liver parfait, toasted grains for crunch, red wine jus. And then she’d started to make her own suggestions, and that’s whenThe Timesreviewed it. Reviewed her meals.
A double-page spread on Dishes, its menu and – Damien loved to remind her –the charming husband and wife behind it. She will remember that Saturday for the rest of her life, paper spread over the reception desk, the afternoon light hitting it,giddily explaining to customers that they were the owners andlook at this review!
Bookings soared, and last February they think they were visited by the ever-elusiveMichelin Guideinspector – solo diner, ordered the wine flight, had a notebook and HB pencil – though they’re still waiting to hear if they got the Michelin star.
She assesses the texts again now even though she could recite them by heart, wanting, suddenly, to go away and pummel dough instead of blagging her way on to a tourist coach.
She can’t seem to look directly at the tasks beyond this one, in the same way you couldn’t do your tax return in a burning building no matter how overdue it was. Simone’s brain has neatly prioritized her disasters, and getting into Mexico is item number one.
She takes a breath; it begins. She walks up to another tour operator who is sporting what Lucy would describe as a lockdown haircut, and speaks: ‘Hi – I hope you can help me. I booked a place on a tour but I can’t seem to find which one. It’s Simone Seaborn.’ No point concealing her name and identity; she needs to use her passport. The only aim is not to get caught with the items, whatever they are.
There are four coaches lined up, engines running quietly, exhausts adding to the dust and the heat, being boarded by sleepy tourists. Mostly older people, the occasional family, snoozing children with dangling legs held close to their parents’ bodies. Simone watches one blonde child in particular for several moments as she stands in front of the man who checks her name on a clipboard.
‘Nothing here,’ he says in a crisp American accent after scanning several sheets of paper twice; the coaches must shuttle back and forth across the border all day long, and Simone, in the worst panic of her life, finds a comfort in this.
Besides, she won’t get caught because she is a good person. She is. She’s even paid for parking here. Absurd but true.
‘No record,’ the man says again to her.
